You reach a point in your life (notice I said “point,” not “age,” but “age” works, too) when everything reminds you of something. It’s not so much that you realize, in the words from Ecclesiastes, that there’s nothing new under the sun, as much as it is being constantly reminded of something you experienced or someone you knew. It might be the face of the supermarket checker, or the way light and shadow appear on a door, or the smell of flowers. I can smell sweet pea flowers and suddenly I’m eight or nine, sitting by the fence of my friend Paul Brown down the street, playing the Battle card game.
It was that infusion of memory, childhood, and life that kept coming to mind as I read Enormous Blue Umbrella, the new collection by Donna Hilbert. The poems are not a chronological walk from childhood to adulthood. Instead, they are about present things that have been strongly shaped by the past, about how we view the world has deep roots in our earliest memories.
Poets have often used their own experiences for their poems. But I came across two collections from recent years that seemed to take experience a bit further and write autobiography in poetic form.
Hannah Sullivan studied classics at Cambridge and then attended Harvard, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature. She lived in New York City for a time, and then for three years was an assistant professor of English literature at Stanford University in California. She eventually returned to Britain and now is an associate professor at New College, Oxford.
Her experiences in New York and California left a powerful imprint, so much so that she published a poetry collection in 2018 that is an autobiographical memoir.
From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel. He writes in his Grace Is Where I Live: Writing as a Christian Vocation that for years he had wanted to be a novelist, not a poet, but it took him a long time to learn (from writers like Flannery O’Connor, who said it directly) that fiction wasn’t about writing about ideas but about people and story.
Leax’s one novel was written for young adults. Nightwatch (1989) is the story of Mark Baker, a boy growing up in a small town. It’s told in disconnected segments – Mark as a young boy, at age 11 or 12, and as a teen. His parents are both people of faith, but Mark is wayward, falling in with friends who tend to lead him further away. But all of Mark’s experiences across the years are leading him directly (and sometimes indirectly) into the arms of God. And he fights it the entire time, until he can no longer fight.
John Leax
It may sound like a familiar story, but Nightwatch isn’t that at all. It contains an edge, a jaggedness that you wouldn’t expect in a young adult novel or a Christian young adult novel. But Leax had taken O’Connor’s advice to heart, and he told a story about people as opposed to ideas. And he let his characters, and especially the character of Mark, to go where they might go.
Leax’s poetry collections include Reaching into Silence, The Task of Adam, Sonnets and Songs, and Country Labors. His non-fiction writing and essay collections include Grace Is Where I Live, In Season and Out, Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism, 120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About, and Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.
In some ways, Nightwatch is difficult to read (thus my comment about jaggedness). But it reads like a real story about a real boy, a boy capable of stupidity and hurting others, a boy who’s running as fast as he can away from God but (very) slowly comes to realize he’s not getting away.
We all know, or should know, who Aslan the Lion represents in The Chronicles of Narnia; C.S. Lewis wasn’t exactly subtle. But the concept of the lion and what it represents includes more than we may not be aware of, and Andrew Klavan at The New Jerusalem describes it in “The Theology of the Lion.”
In 2015, two activist journalists documented that Planned Parenthood of California was selling unborn baby parts, in violation of federal and even state law. The then-attorney general of California, who went on to become Vice President in 2020, took action – against the journalists. Ten years later, the state of California dropped all felony charges.
Like everyone else, I’ve been watching the rollout of revelations about what USAID funded, didn’t fund, funded but not in the way it’s been publicized, and so on down the list. Yes, there was money diverted from humanitarian to terrorist groups, like to build tunnels in Gaza. Yes, no one intended hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent on irrigation systems for poppy fields in Afghanistan. Yes, $8.2 million went to Politico, but it was all for subscriptions (and it was different purposes for funding for The New York Times, BBC, Associated Press, and Christianity Today). But while USAID did funnel money into the EcoHealth Alliance and thus on to the Wuhan lab of COVID fame, it wasn’t USAID that provided $10 million to create transgender lab animals like rats, mice, and monkeys.
